Charles Baudelaire: Flowers of Evil (1971)
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Pierre-Yves Trémois: Baudelaire (1971)
Charles Baudelaire: Flowers of Evil (Heritage Press, 1971)
[Acquired: Hard-to-Find Books, St. Benedict's St., Auckland CBD - April 7, 2021]:
Charles Baudelaire. Flowers of Evil: Translated into English by Various Hands. Ed. James Laver. Illustrated by Pierre-Yves Trémois. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Heritage Press, 1971.
We took the bus into town a couple of weeks ago - Bronwyn to deliver some new textile works for a group show at Masterworks Gallery on Upper Queen Street, and me to have a snout around the famous Hard-to-Find Secondhand Bookshop, which is literally just around the corner in St. Benedict's Street.
One of the books I bought there was a sumptuous Heritage Press edition of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, lavishly illustrated by Pierre-Yves Trémois.
I wrote a piece about Baudelaire a few years ago on The Imaginary Museum, making a - possibly somewhat incongruous - comparison between his work and that of English nature poet John Clare.
In that piece I concentrated on contrasting Clare's poem "The Skylark" with Baudelaire's "The Albatross." Here I think I'd like to talk about "Un Voyage à Cythère' [Voyage to Cythera] instead.
The last stanza of this poem is deservedly famous as a kind of summation of Baudelaire's life and work as a whole:
Dans ton île, ô Vénus! je n'ai trouvé deboutA long, long time ago - back in 1984, in fact - I tried to turn this into English:
Qu'un gibet symbolique où pendait mon image...
— Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage
De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans dégoût!
In your island, Venus, I found nothing uprightThe poem serves as a kind of ironic undercutting of Watteau's famous painting, sometimes referred to as "The Voyage to Cythera," though its official title is "The Embarkation for Cythera."
save one symbolic gibbet with my image
on it - Lord God, give me the strength and courage
to see my heart and body in the light
without disgust ...
Mon coeur, comme un oiseau, voltigeait tout joyeux Et planait librement à l'entour des cordages; Le navire roulait sous un ciel sans nuages; Comme un ange enivré d'un soleil radieux. Quelle est cette île triste et noire? — C'est Cythère, Nous dit-on, un pays fameux dans les chansons Eldorado banal de tous les vieux garçons. Regardez, après tout, c'est une pauvre terre. — Île des doux secrets et des fêtes du coeur! De l'antique Vénus le superbe fantôme Au-dessus de tes mers plane comme un arôme Et charge les esprits d'amour et de langueur. Belle île aux myrtes verts, pleine de fleurs écloses, Vénérée à jamais par toute nation, Où les soupirs des coeurs en adoration Roulent comme l'encens sur un jardin de roses Ou le roucoulement éternel d'un ramier! — Cythère n'était plus qu'un terrain des plus maigres, Un désert rocailleux troublé par des cris aigres. J'entrevoyais pourtant un objet singulier! Ce n'était pas un temple aux ombres bocagères, Où la jeune prêtresse, amoureuse des fleurs, Allait, le corps brûlé de secrètes chaleurs, Entrebâillant sa robe aux brises passagères; Mais voilà qu'en rasant la côte d'assez près Pour troubler les oiseaux avec nos voiles blanches, Nous vîmes que c'était un gibet à trois branches, Du ciel se détachant en noir, comme un cyprès. De féroces oiseaux perchés sur leur pâture Détruisaient avec rage un pendu déjà mûr, Chacun plantant, comme un outil, son bec impur Dans tous les coins saignants de cette pourriture; Les yeux étaient deux trous, et du ventre effondré Les intestins pesants lui coulaient sur les cuisses, Et ses bourreaux, gorgés de hideuses délices, L'avaient à coups de bec absolument châtré. Sous les pieds, un troupeau de jaloux quadrupèdes, Le museau relevé, tournoyait et rôdait; Une plus grande bête au milieu s'agitait Comme un exécuteur entouré de ses aides. Habitant de Cythère, enfant d'un ciel si beau, Silencieusement tu souffrais ces insultes En expiation de tes infâmes cultes Et des péchés qui t'ont interdit le tombeau. Ridicule pendu, tes douleurs sont les miennes! Je sentis, à l'aspect de tes membres flottants, Comme un vomissement, remonter vers mes dents Le long fleuve de fiel des douleurs anciennes; Devant toi, pauvre diable au souvenir si cher, J'ai senti tous les becs et toutes les mâchoires Des corbeaux lancinants et des panthères noires Qui jadis aimaient tant à triturer ma chair. — Le ciel était charmant, la mer était unie; Pour moi tout était noir et sanglant désormais, Hélas! et j'avais, comme en un suaire épais, Le coeur enseveli dans cette allégorie. Dans ton île, ô Vénus! je n'ai trouvé debout Qu'un gibet symbolique où pendait mon image... — Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans dégoût!
My heart, a bird, seemed joyfully to fly And round the rigging cruised with nimble gyre. The vessel rolled beneath the cloudless sky Like a white angel, drunk with solar fire. What is that sad, black island like a pall? Why, Cytherea, famed in many a book, The Eldorado of old-stagers. Look: It's but a damned poor country after all! Isle of sweet secrets and heart-feasting fire! Of antique Venus the majestic ghost Rolls like a storm of fragrance from your coast Filling our souls with languor and desire! Isle of green myrtles, where each flower uncloses, Adored by nations till the end of time: Sighs of adoring hearts, like incense, climb. And pour their perfume over sheaves of roses, Or groves of turtles in an endless coo! But no! it was a waste where nothing grows, Torn only by the raucous cries of crows: Yet there a curious object rose in view. This was no temple hid in bosky trees, Where the young priestess, amorous of flowers, Whom secretly a loving flame devours, Walks with her robe half-open to the breeze. For as we moved inshore to coast the shallows And our white canvas scared the crows to fly, Like a tall cypress, blackened on the sky, We saw it was a gaunt three-forking gallows. Fierce birds, perched on their meal, began to slash And rip with rage a rotten corpse that swung. Each screwed and chiselled with its beak among The crisp and bleeding crannies of the hash. His eyes were holes: from open stomach direly His heavy tripes cascaded to his thighs. Gorged with such ghastly dainties to the eyes, His torturers had gelded him entirely. Beneath, some jealous prowling quadrupeds, With lifted muzzles, for the leavings scrambled. The largest seemed, as in the midst he gambolled, An executioner among his aides. Native of Cytherea's cloudless clime In silent suffering you paid the price, And expiated ancient cults of vice With generations of forbidden crime. Ridiculous hanged man! Your griefs I know. I felt, to see you swing above the heath, Like nausea slowly rising to my teeth, The bilious stream of ancient human woe. Poor devil, dear to memory! before me I seemed to feel each talon, fang, and beak Of all the stinking crows and panthers sleek That in my lifetime ever chewed and tore me. The sky was charming and the sea unclouded, But all was black and bloody to my mind. As in a dismal winding-sheet entwined, My heart was in this allegory shrouded. A gallows where my image hung apart Was all I found on Venus' isle of sighs. O God, give me the strength to scrutinise, Without disgust, my body and my heart! — Roy Campbell, Poems of Baudelaire (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952)
As you can see, Watteau's painting exists in two different forms, an earlier and a later one, one housed in the Louvre, the other in the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin. Both versions depict a group of revellers on the island of Venus. Whether the majority of them are leaving or arriving has been much argued over. Certainly the party seems to be in a continuous state of flux.
Whatever the ambiguities of Watteau's canvas, painted - it should be remembered - at the end rather than the beginning of Louis XIV, the Sun King's reign (1643-1715), Baudelaire's poem is harsh and direct. For him the island is the "Eldorado banal de tous les vieux garçons" [banal El Dorado for all aging boys]. The gibbet becomes it better than Watteau's fête galante.
And yet, such as it is, this too is an essential part of life: seeing it plainly, without unnecessary disgust or self-abasement is the ultimate goal of all of Baudelaire's most extreme works - an aim he bequeathed (I would have thought) to all subsequent poets.
Another point of interest in this purchase is its publisher, The Heritage Press of New York. This began as the commercial arm of the Limited Editions Club, started by visionary publisher George Macy in 1929. It put out larger print runs of some of the very expensive books put out by the latter.
These included a 1935 edition of James Joyce's Ulysses, with line drawings by Matisse, but actually the list of their publications goes on and on (at last count they'd reached 589 volumes).
Here's a list of the Heritage Press volumes in my own collection:
- Richard F. Burton, trans. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night: A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments. 1885. Decorated with 1001 Illustrations by Valenti Angelo. 3 vols. New York: The Heritage Press, 1934.
- Richard F. Burton, trans. The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night: A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments. 1885. Decorated with 1001 Illustrations by Valenti Angelo. 3 vols. 1934. The Heritage Press. New York: The George Macy Companies, Inc., 1962.
- Sir Richard Burton, trans. The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. Notes by Henry Torrens, Edward Lane, John Payne. Illustrations by Arthur Szyk. 2 vols. New York: The Heritage Press, 1955.
- Sir Richard Burton, trans. The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. Notes by Henry Torrens, Edward Lane, John Payne. Illustrations by Arthur Szyk. 1955. The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1983.
- George Macy, ed. A Soldier's Reader: A Volume Containing Four Hundred Thousand Words of Select Literary Entertainment for the American Soldier on the Ground or In the Air. New York: The Heritage Press, 1943.
- Alexander Pope, trans. The Odyssey of Homer. 1725-26. Illustrated by John Flaxman. 1942. Avon, Connecticut: The Heritage Press, 1970.
- William York Tindall, ed. The Poems of W. B. Yeats. Illustrated by Robin Jacques. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Heritage Press, 1970.
- Charles Baudelaire. Flowers of Evil: Translated into English by Various Hands. Ed. James Laver. Illustrated by Pierre-Yves Trémois. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Heritage Press, 1971.
I think it's safe to say that I'll be looking out for more of their books in future. They started quite a while before the British Folio Society, but there certainly seem to be strong analogies between the aims of the two series.
And finally, there's the artist, Pierre-Yves Trémois, who died recently at the advanced age of 99.
One notices certain repetitive motifs in his work: eagles, girls, lovers ... They may seem a little dated now. It has, after all, been fifty years since the book was published, and any shock value in his images has long since dissipated.
On the other hand, perhaps it's rather that the energy and passion of his drawings has come back into focus after all these years, and that one can now regard his line drawings as classical, almost in the mode of the immortal Doré himself.
Works:
- Oeuvres. Ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1. 1934. Paris: Gallimard, 1944.
- L’Oeuvre. Ed. P. Schneider. Les Portiques, 16. Paris: Le Club Français du Livre, 1955.
Poetry:
- Les fleurs du mal: Les Épaves / Bribes / Poèmes divers / Amoenitates Beligicae. Édition illustrée. Ed. Antoine Adam. 1961. Classiques Garnier. Paris: Éditions Garnier Frères, 1970.
- Les fleurs du mal: Édition établie selon un ordre nouveau. 1857. Ed. Yves Florenne. Préface de Marie-Jeanne Durry. Le Livre de Poche, 677. Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1972.
- Les Fleurs du Mal: Translated and Presented on Pages Facing the Original French Text as Flowers of Evil. Trans. George Dillon & Edna St. Vincent Millay. With an Introduction and an Unusual Bibliographical Note by Miss Millay. 1936. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc., 1962.
- Flowers of Evil: Translated into English by Various Hands. Ed. James Laver. Illustrated by Pierre-Yves Trémois. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Heritage Press, 1971.
- Selected Poems. Trans. Francis Scarfe. The Penguin Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961.
- Clark, Carol, & Robert Sykes, ed. Baudelaire in English. Penguin Classics: Poets in Translation. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997.
Prose:
- Petits Poèmes en Prose. 1869. Ed. Melvin Zimmerman. French Classics. Ed. Eugène Vinaver. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1968.
- Paris Spleen. 1869. Trans. Louise Varèse. 1947. A New Directions PaperBook, NDP294. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1970.
- Intimate Journals. Trans. Christopher Isherwood. Illustrated with drawings by Baudelaire. 1930. Introduction by W. H. Auden. 1949. London: Panther Books, 1969.
- Selected Writings on Art and Artists. Trans. P. E. Charvet. 1972. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Translation:
- Poe, Edgar Allan. Histoires Extraordinaires. Trans. Charles Baudelaire. Préface de Julio Cortázár. Collection Folio, 310. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1973.
Secondary:
- Starkie, Enid. Baudelaire. 1957. Pelican Biographies. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.
- Pichois, Claude. Baudelaire. Additional Research by Jean Ziegler. 1987. Trans. Graham Robb. 1989. London: Vintage, 1991.
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- category - French Literature: Poetry
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